TOWARDS AND OLD ARCHITECTURE
Medieval city at various levels of perception and meaning in both building and piazza was lost on the space-oriented architect. Perhaps the symbols, besides being foreign in content, were at a scale and a degree of complexity too subtle for today’s bruised sensibilities and impatient pace. This explains, perhaps, the ironical fact that the return to iconography for some of us architects of that generation was via the sensibilities of the Pop artists of the early 1960s and via the duck and the decorated shed on Route 66 : from Rome to Las Vegas, but also back again form Las Vvegas to Rome .
THE CATHDERAL AS DUCK AND SHED
In iconographic terms, the cathedral shed and a duck. The Late Byzantine Metropole Cathedral in Athens is absurd as a piece of architecture (Fig. 87). It is “Out of scale”: Its small size does not correspond to its complex from-that is , if from must be determined primarily by structure-because the space that the square room encloses could be spanned without the interior supports and the complex roof configuration of dome, drum, and vaults. However it is not absurd as a duck-as a domed Greek cross, evolved structurally from large buildings in greater cities, but developed symbolically here to mean cathedral. And this duck is itself decorated with and appliqué collage of objets trouves-bas-reliefs in masonry-more or less explicitly symbolic in content.
Amines Cathedral is a billboard with a building behind it (Fig. 88). Gothic cathedrals have been considered weak in that they did not achieve an “organic unity” between front and side. But this disjunction is a natural reflection of and inherent contradiction in a complex building that, toward the cathedral square, is a relatively two-dimensional screen for propaganda and, in back, is a masonry systems building. This is the reflection of a contradiction between image and function that the decorated shed often accommodates. (The shed behind is also a duck because its shape is that of a cross)
The façades of the great cathedrals of the Ile de France are two- dirnensional planes at the scale of whole ; were to evole at the top corners into towers to connect with the surrounding countryside. But in detail these facades are building in themselves, simulating an architecture of space in the strongly three-dimensional relief of their sculpture. The niches for statues-as Sir Jonh Summerson has pointed out-are yet another-level of architecture within architecture. But the impact of the façade comes from the immensely complex meaning dederived from the symbolism and explicit associations of the aedicules and their statues and from their relative positions and size in the hierarchic order of the kingdom of heaven on the facades. In this orchestration of